History

The history of South Texas is more racially and ethnically complex than many people realize. As a border area, South Texas has experienced some especially interesting forms of racial and ethnic intersection, influenced by the relatively small number of blacks (especially in certain counties), the function and importance of the South Texas cattle trade, proximity to Mexico, and the history of anti-black violence. The essays in African Americans in South Texas History give insight into this fascinating history.
The articles in this volume, written over a span of almost three decades, were chosen for their readability, scholarship, and general interest.
Contributors:
Jennifer Borrer
Edward Byerly
Judith Kaaz Doyle
Rob Fink
Robert A. Goldberg
Kenneth Wayne Howell
Larry P. Knight
Rebecca A. Kosary
David Louzon
Sarah R. Massey
Jeanette Nyda Mendelssohn Passty
Janice L. Sumler-Edmond
Cary D. Wintz
Rue Wood
" . . . a valuable addition to the literature chronicling the black experience in the land of the Lone Star. While previous studies have concentrated on regions most reflective of Dixie origins, this collection examines the tri-ethnic area of Texas adjoining Mexico wherein cotton was scarce and cattle plentiful. Glasrud has assembled an excellent group of essays from which readers will learn much."-L. Patrick Hughes, professor of history, Austin Community College

Bookended by remarks from African American diplomats Walter C. Carrington and Charles Stith, the essays in this volume use close readings of speeches, letters, historical archives, diaries, and memoirs of policymakers and newly available FBI files to confront much-neglected questions related to race and foreign relations in the United States. Why, for instance, did African Americans profess loyalty and support for the diplomatic initiatives of a nation that undermined their social, political, and economic well-being through racist policies and cultural practices? Other contributions explore African Americans' history in the diplomatic and consular services and the influential roles of cultural ambassadors like Joe Louis and Louis Armstrong. The volume concludes with an analysis of the effects on race and foreign policy in the administration of Barack Obama. Groundbreaking and critical, African Americans in U.S. Foreign Policy expands on the scope and themes of recent collections to offer the most up-to-date scholarship to students in a range of disciplines, including U.S. and African American history, Africana studies, political science, and American studies.

Until recently, histories of the American West gave little evidence of the presence—let alone importance—of African Americans in the unfolding of the western frontier. There might have been a mention of Estevan, slavery, or the Dred Scott decision, but the rich and varied experience of African Americans on the Great Plains went largely unnoted. This book, the first of its kind, supplies that critical missing chapter in American history.

Originally published over the span of twenty-five years in Great Plains Quarterly, the essays collected here describe the part African Americans played in the frontier army and as homesteaders, community builders, and activists. The authors address race relations, discrimination, and violence. They tell of the struggle for civil rights and against Jim Crow, and they examine African American cultural growth and contributions as well as economic and political aspects of black life on the Great Plains. From individuals such as “Pap” Singleton, Era Bell Thompson, Aaron Douglas, and Alphonso Trent; to incidents at Fort Hays, Brownsville, and Topeka; to defining moments in government, education, and the arts—this collection offers the first comprehensive overview of the black experience on the Plains.

African & American�tells the story of the much overlooked experience of first and second generation West African immigrants and refugees in the United States during the last forty years. Interrogating the complex role of post-colonialism in the recent history of black America, Marilyn Halter and Violet Showers Johnson highlight the intricate patterns of emigrant work and family adaptation, the evolving global ties with Africa and Europe, and the translocal connections among the West African enclaves in the United States.

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Drawing on a rich variety of sources, including original interviews, personal narratives, cultural and historical analysis, and documentary and demographic evidence,�African & American�explores issues of cultural identity formation and socioeconomic incorporation among this new West African diaspora. Bringing the experiences of those of recent African ancestry from the periphery to the center of current debates in the fields of immigration, ethnic, and African American studies, Halter and Johnson examine the impact this community has had on the changing meaning of �African Americanness� and address the provocative question of whether West African immigrants are, indeed, becoming the newest African Americans.

Focusing on the problems and conflicts of doing African diaspora research
from various disciplinary perspectives, these essays situate, describe, and reflect
on the current practice of diaspora scholarship. Tejumola Olaniyan, James H. Sweet,
and the international group of contributors assembled here seek to enlarge
understanding of how the diaspora is conceived and explore possibilities for the
future of its study. With the aim of initiating interdisciplinary dialogue on the
practice of African diaspora studies, they emphasize learning from new perspectives
that take advantage of intersections between disciplines. Ultimately, they advocate
a fuller sense of what it means to study the African diaspora in a truly global
way.

African Economic History, published once a year by the African Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, focuses on recent economic change in Africa as well as the colonial and precolonial economic history of the continent.

Hunger, malnutrition, poor health, and deficient food systems are widespread in Sub-Saharan Africa. While much is known about African food systems and about African health and nutrition, our understanding of the interaction between food systems and health and nutrition is deficient. Moreover, the potential health gains from changes in the food system are frequently overlooked in policy design and implementation.

The authors of The African Food System and its Interactions with Human Health and Nutrition examine how public policy and research aimed at the food system and its interaction with human health and nutrition can improve the well-being of Africans and help achieve the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Several of the MDGs focus on health-related challenges: hunger alleviation; maternal, infant, and child mortality; the control of HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria; and the provision of safe water and improved sanitation. These challenges are intensified by problems of low agricultural and food system productivity, gender inequity, lack of basic infrastructure, and environmental degradation, all of which have direct and indirect detrimental effects on health, nutrition, and the food system.

Reflecting the complexity and multidisciplinary nature of these problems and their solutions, this book features contributions by world-renowned experts in economics, agriculture, health, nutrition, food science, and demography.

The incompleteness of the decolonization struggle is evident in the fact that Africa today remains widely associated with chaos, illness, and disorder. This misconception is a latter-day invocation of the idea of “the white man’s burden,” which was central in providing justifica-tion for the violence of Europe’s military conquest and colonial occupation of Africa. The essays in this collection address the enduring intellectual legacies of European colonialism in Africa. The challenge for African and non-African scholars alike is to establish the fact of African humanity, in all its diversity, and to enable the representation of Africa beyond its historical role as the foil to Western humanity. The significant contribution of this volume is to move the discussion of decolonization in Africa to the postcolonial period, and to begin a post-neocolonial phase in the Academy. All of the essays address topics and themes in African states and societies since those states achieved political independence. African Intellectuals and Decolonization addresses the enduring intellectual legacies of European colonialism in Africa while providing scholarly tools to assist in the ongoing processes of decolonizing the Academy and the African continent more broadly.

There have been few book-length engagements with the question of sexuality in Africa, let alone African homosexuality. African Intimacies simultaneously responds to the public debate on the “Africanness” of homosexuality and interrogates the meaningfulness of the terms “sexuality” and “homosexuality” outside Euro-American discourse. Speculating on cultural practices interpreted by missionaries as sodomy and resistance to colonialism, Neville Hoad begins by analyzing the 1886 Bugandan martyrs incident—the execution of thirty men in the royal court. Then, in a series of close readings, he addresses questions of race, sex, and globalization in the 1965 Wole Soyinka novel The Interpreters, examines the emblematic 1998 Lambeth conference of Anglican bishops, considers the imperial legacy in depictions of the HIV/AIDS crisis, and reveals how South African writer Phaswane Mpe’s contemporary novel Welcome to Our Hillbrow problematizes notions of African identity and cosmopolitanism. Hoad’s assessment of the historical valence of homosexuality in Africa shows how the category has served a key role in a larger story, one in which sexuality has been made in line with a vision of white Western truth, limiting an understanding of intimacy that could imagine an African universalism. Neville Hoad is assistant professor of English at the University of Texas, Austin.

"This volume has much to recommend it -- providing fascinating and
stimulating insights into many arenas of material culture, many of which still
remain only superficially explored in the archaeological literature." --
Archaeological Review

"... a vivid introduction to the
topic.... A glimpse into the unique and changing identities in an ever-changing
world." -- Come-All-Ye

Fourteen interdisciplinary essays open
new perspectives for understanding African societies and cultures through the
contextualized study of objects, treating everything from the production of material
objects to the meaning of sticks, masquerades, household tools, clothing, and the
television set in the contemporary repertoire of African material culture.

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